Late last night (CET), we reported on the story that the VLC project needed more developers for the Mac version of this popular video player, or else the Mac variant may disappear. Just about every website out there reported on this issue, but it turns out it all got a bit exaggerated (on the internet? Surely you jest...). We spoke to VLC developer Pierre d'Herbemont to clarify the issue, and they've also put up a wiki page about the so-called demise of the Mac version of VLC. He also detailed what, exactly, they meant by "Apple is blocking us".

It was mature and tested but struggled to support CSS. Even the earliest buggiest betas of Mozilla and Netscape 6 had superior CSS support to IE6. The rendering engine was solid, most of the problems came with the decision to render the UI with XUL rather that sticking the new rendering engine in a more conservative UI.

Well... and the networking code and all the other stuff they decided to replace. The number one priority should have been to finish Raptor/Gecko and get it out in a usable release no matter how much they disapproved of the code quality of the rest of the code-base.

If the current code base for FF had been closed and was released for the first time, today, to a new generation of OSS developers, I'll bet they'd look at it and say "Yuck! This is just awful! We've got to rewrite this mess from scratch!". And when they came out with their first barely functional release, people would oooh and ahhh about how small and efficient and clean the new code-base was... and in several years we'd have something that was usable, well-tested, huge, and "a mess".